How to Make a Good Google Analytics Report

A good Google Analytics report does more than just show you numbers, it tells you a story about your website's performance and answers your most important business questions. This guide walks you through how to build a clear, insightful GA4 report from scratch. You'll learn which metrics matter, how to add crucial context, and how to turn raw data into a story that actually guides your business strategy.

First, Know Your Audience (And What They Actually Care About)

Before you even open Google Analytics, the most important step is to ask one simple question: "Who is this report for, and what single business decision does it need to help them make?" Without this focus, you'll end up with a dozen charts that look nice but have zero impact. The specific questions and metrics you track for an Ecommerce brand trying to increase repeat purchases will be vastly different from a B2B SaaS company aiming for more demo requests.

Answering this "who and why" question grounds your entire report in a specific audience and objective, preventing you from simply exporting a collection of default vanity metrics.

Example 1: The Ecommerce Brand Manager

Let's say a junior marketing manager needs to create a weekly acquisitions report for their CMO. When the CMO asks, "How did our campaigns perform last week?" they aren't just curious about website visits. Under the surface, they're really asking:

• Which marketing channels are bringing us our most valuable customers?
• How much did we spend on ads, and what was the return (Total revenue)?
• Are new customers who find our content actually purchasing anything?

For a report for this audience, you'd want to focus on metrics that connect activity directly to revenue. Specifically:

• Sessions by Channel: The basic source of traffic (Organic, Paid, Direct, etc.).
• Total Revenue by Channel: The holy grail metric that shows which channels are actually ringing the cash register.
• Total Purchasers: The raw count of customers who completed a checkout.
• Total ad spend: Pulled, mostly, from your individual ad platforms to cross-reference with GA4 events.
• Purchase conversion rate: Captures the efficiency of turning site visits into purchases.
• Conversion Rate: Not just any 'conversion,' but the percentage of users from Paid Search, for example, who become an "Email" subscriber for newsletters.

Notice how each of these data points relates to answering that 'was last campaign profitable' user need?

Example 2: The B2B SaaS Content Marketer

Now, imagine a content marketer at a B2B software company. Their manager has asked for a monthly "Blog Performance Report". Underneath this request are questions your SaaS marketing manager always asks in 1-on-1s:

• Which blog post categories are driving qualified leads? Is it our content marketing tutorials or thought leadership business trends content?
• Are our articles attracting the right kind of website visitors and keeping potential leads engaged and on the page for long? Are we ranking on valuable keywords to get discovered on SEO?

For your Content Performance Report, you'd likely feature a curated dashboard report view showing a blog landing-page, topic, or even author view focusing around core metrics like:

• First user medium: This would show your highest traffic source to the business or product/solution blog articles. It often comes from Organic Search, but your blog posts too may have gotten a nice social media bump.
• First user manual campaign name: If you did some blog cross-promotion efforts with a paid campaign team, showing the UTM coded paid traffic can be interesting for your monthly blog view in GA4 too.
• Engaged sessions: You want to confirm 'high-quality user' engagement per page and that it correlates to new users coming back later and becoming future 'new leads'.
• User Conversion Rate (against a 'Demo Request' custom conversion goal): Not just 'all Conversions' because for your CMO, who often has to justify marketing-team salary budgets or contractor headcount with the Board, 'new trials generated per post' can be the critical KPI.

With GA4, "conversions" aren't just purchases. For instance, in GA4, you can create a Custom Event Conversion Goal for button clicks (e.g., a request-demo submit button on your landing page). Having one view showing your blog page URLs that get demo clicks as a success metric could show huge value when paired with something like your blog page URL with the most engaged minutes or lowest 'Bounce' page. The context you can build just from choosing what you report is your storytelling for Business Reporting.

Building Your Report In Google Analytics (A High Level-GA4-Centric Step by Step)

Now the magic: creating the GA4 Report in our custom "Reports section!". A step-by-step for a typical "custom 'Top Campaign Report" everyone seems to want:

First, Navigate to 'Reports Tab &gt, Library'

Let's learn to make our first new custom GA Report card with the GA4 library.

• Inside GA4 you first hit the 'Library' tab inside 'Reports'.
• Then you will "Create New Report". You might be overwhelmed by seeing how flexible you can create things. Take this advice and only stick to "Dimensions" like traffic acquisition here, alongside KPIs you care about (demo requests for our B2C case) and you'll find it gets easy, really fast.
• Create whatever your new "Card" will be. I made, to continue the example from above, one for a fictitious Campaign Name for the client, since they used a link tag tracking the "Top Free tools list" campaign they'd launched on FB, just for example. And the "report viewer" for them will also showcase your core KPI 'new trials'.

Drill Down Deeper: Adding a Comparison View

Another GA tool which is right next to the 'customization' panel is the comparison filter link (with a plus icon) which you can easily add after a custom GA card Report tab is created to either deep dive or just view the overall "Site traffic" versus this campaign. Another tip from GA Power Users is also to use the same to view, for instance, say how your campaign is performing against a prior period to use past data for your benchmarking to show performance improvement for next month.

Now we have a template for a great custom GA4 Performance Reporting Card. Let’s finish it by ensuring it's easy for stakeholders to get value.

Add Comparisons for Context

Numbers in a report are pretty much useless in isolation. “1,500 visitors” doesn’t tell you much. Is that great? Is it terrible?

• But '2,500 new visitors from Paid Search Campaigns (a 30% increase year-over-year)' for your landing page? Your CMO loves getting those insights like that delivered without your comments in a meeting.
• To do so inside a report card just use that Comparison Filter at top of GA dashboard I mentioned. Always try using both or one if necessary:

Always ask “Compared to what?”. GA4 will do the lifting and calculate a percent change for reports' dashboard as needed. It's simple for getting that bit right but I've seen teams forget.

Beyond Basic GA Setup: How to Get Advanced Reporting Value and What Makes a Good Business Review Meeting Story

We need to understand the human elements to data presentation. This part will walk through 'how to'.

1. Every Report Story, if Good, Always Has a Compelling Title

The heading frames everything. Don't call it another “Top Campaign Perf. Report”. Call it instead say, "How Organic and New Trial Performance Beat Out Q Projections with Content Marketing this Quarter". Why? It shows what you found already to your audience upfront – saves them guessing what to takeaway.

Don’t just use a date either. "GA Marketing Overview, Week Nov. 1" for a title when you have to send a PDF or Google Data Studio view as GA won’t just be a screen you’re sharing only. Be your stakeholder voice in your team. Your storytelling with reports elevates your credibility faster in your business career.

The Takeaway Section (Never Forget to Add this!)

Each visual should include a clear header sentence that directly explains what this chart is showing. Avoid simply repeating data labels like, for example, "sessions By traffic". Instead, add context to it: “Organic Search: Driving Over 55% YoY new traffic to the blog in Q1”.

Always Add 'Next Steps' Recommendations

This is a critical 'power move'. Don’t just present what already happened, propose what could be done:

Maybe for the Ecommerce company, a smart reporting idea for 'next steps' could be, "Since paid Instagram advertising resulted in the lowest cost per new subscriber for example for email, we might plan on increasing next week's or daily budget on this channel by X percent.” This simple "why" can lead to great brainstorming inside team meetings if done with just light analysis.

Never Lie in Story Time

Also, present bad results inside GA as 'lessons learned' - it is the best way to turn bad results into positive moments with reports. If your FB campaign completely flopped badly and didn't give your revenue return as expected, instead of burying away that insight, show a slide or section in your reports: “Learnings:" and just explain what seems happened. Perhaps it's a bad product market-fit or new feature. So you have a point here not just a failed campaign. Show it so the company can learn.

Final Thoughts

Building a great Google Analytics report is less about technical know-how and more about strategic thinking. Always start with your audience and their specific business questions, and select KPIs that provide concise answers. Context is key, and context isn't just about comparison analytics inside GA, it's about ensuring that your stakeholders have confidence in a teammate's strategic decisions through great reporting stories. If you use our expert tips, you'll make every business review a great business storytelling moment for you too.

I built my Business Reporting Career not only through expertise in crafting those insightful GA story dashboards every C Suite manager loved but also through the time my analysis would save teams from needing to wade through endless 'reports for nothing'. Finding AI Analytics tools to handle reporting grunt work was magic. For example, we created Graphed to do exactly this 'hard work', by building upon a simple ChatGPT-like Chat User Prompt interface to pull live platform data and then even turn quick, messy data-chat questions into a real professional Marketing business analytics Reporting story Dashboard without us needing to really know "How". With more than 25 live API platform data integrations (such as Shopify Sales to social like FB organic page data, TikTok Campaign spend etc.) Our 'Report Creator' turns weekly long, often painful, manual GA spreadsheets into seconds saved, not days wasted inside GA report builders to solve actual business and customer marketing insight problems.